What They’re Talking About When They Talk About the Intifada
As my mother was dying in America, growing weaker month by month, the flowers out on our porch were dying, too. It couldn’t be helped. It was Israel’s sabbatical year. By Jewish law, the earth lay fallow. I couldn’t weed them, couldn’t drown them with water to make up for my frequent absences. No one else in the family loved them as much as I; and while my mother was dying, they kept slipping my mind. I didn’t love them myself.
They weren’t getting fed at their appointed times: the tiny white blossoms with orange at the center were supposed to be watered every morning, before the day got hot; the pink geraniums, twice a week; the purple nasturtiums, every other day. The leaves turned yellow, then brown. I’d return from a trip to Los Angeles (where I’d run up my mother’s long-distance bill: “Don’t any of you dare take buses! Don’t go anywhere!”) and after a day or two would notice that the plants were starving. Who cared? The intifada was in full swing. Mothers were shot as they drove to work, men had been lynched; father after father after father, gone; children were being torn out by their roots. I was losing Mommy. The land was filling with orphans. They were crying everywhere. Hands and legs were blown off. Our souls turned dry to the touch. Mothers were screaming. Blood soaked the soil.
The flowers withered, shriveled, and said goodbye.
The ambulances were shrieking and my electrified heart kept jumping out of its socket. When it was an act of heroism to let the children go to school, and an act of insanity to go downtown for a cappuccino…when I didn’t want anyone out of my sight, wanted everybody to just stay home for goodness sakes; and there was nowhere to go but out on the porch, and nowhere to turn but into our own hearts, I remembered the flowers.
My mother had died. We were turning to stone. From the porch we heard the explosions, and saw the plumes of smoke. It was Erev Pesach. The kitchen cabinets had turned white with bleach and our hands were turning red.
I stole out of the house. I wanted to forget. I wanted the flower boxes to overflow.
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The Russian woman behind the counter dispensed instructions: these, she said, you have to water when the soil gets dry to the touch, and these, every day; these can get direct sunlight, but these just light, no sun. As she rang up twelve plants and a big bag of moist black dirt, the infants stood in their innocence before me, their tightly- shut petals all in a row, and their glossy little leaves like green hearts. My heart sprouted hope. “What do you think of all this?” I asked her, gesturing out the store window to Jerusalem, and the sky. She shrugged. “The world likes us more now, don’t you think,” I said, “now that we’re being killed?” She smiled.
Back home, it took all morning to complete the transplanting. It was hot out there on the porch. Inside, everyone else in the family was scrubbing away. When I finished, I sneaked off to take a nap…a deep, deep sleep. I wanted to dream about my mother but she didn’t show. When I woke, I went out to check if any of them had blossomed.
Not yet.
The sky was intensely gentle, and the afternoon breeze like a mother’s caress.
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Just as we sat down for the Seder, the world echoed with thunder. Lightning flashed and crashed around us. Hail shot down like bullets. How strange, in this season. We read: These are the ten plagues which the Holy One, Blessed is He, brought upon the Egyptians: blood, frogs, vermin, wild beasts, pestilence, boils, hail…In every generation, it is each person’s duty to regard himself as though he personally had gone out of Egypt.
How would they fare out there in the punishing downpour, my little blossoms, out in the cold? At dawn I paid them a visit. They were wilting, but hadn’t been destroyed. “They’re so fragile,” I said. “I wonder why they don’t die.”
“Because they don’t fight against the rain,” said my husband.
When the holiday departed, we turned on the radio and heard about a suicide bombing in Netanya.
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My flowers blossomed and bloomed and multiplied and died and budded, the endless unfolding of sheer, unnecessary beauty a synonym for God’s extravagant kindness. The IDF entered Ramallah and the suicide bombings stopped. What joy! Just to be alive! Back in the store, I got more dirt, more plants. I told the Russian woman that I wanted tiny white blossoms, the kind that spread. She nodded. I was probably one of her best customers. “I get so mad reading the paper,” I told her, “what the world is saying about us. Thank God for the flowers. They’re cheaper than a therapist.”
“Yes, I know. My son, too. He’s thirty-one. He was in Jenin last week. A reservist. He sees CNN, he reads the paper. He gets furious at what they say, their ludicrous stories. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s jumping out of his skin. I tell him, this is the power of a lie. Why watch it? This one looks not so good,” she said, pointing to a wilting white pansy. “You can have it for free. My son and I, ever since we got here eleven years ago, always, this terrorism. If not for that, we would live with them. Why not? Have a state next door, who cares?”
The tiniest flowers opened their secret faces, petal by petal, and greeted me. The black loss of my mother kept blossoming over and over again, new buds born amidst long-buried memories. Spring doesn’t die. Once, as I was watering the weak one, the pansy, the runt of the litter, I remembered something in the paper, that in one of bombings, a few blocks from our apartment, a father found his son on the street and kneeled over him crying, “Don’t die! Daddy loves you! Don’t die!” But he died. Lo and behold, the pansy bloomed.
What magnificent mornings! We set up the porch table, put up the umbrella. I made cappuccino and drifted through all the bad news in the morning paper. The sunshine dappled the trees, the flowers were smiling, and after all, it’s in the Psalms. Truth will come out of the ground.